iBuypower's amazing transparent LCD side panel launches in February

The full color transparent panel acts as a second monitor to display whatever you want on the outside of your PC.

iBuypower wowed us with a transparent LCD side panel at Computex back in June of 2016, which displayed a video of swirling ink, mesmerizing patterns and logos for Intel and iBuypower. It looked seriously cool, but after six months of tweaking Project Snowblind, as it's called, looks even better. iBuypower brought an updated version to CES to show off something new: color.

Hardware EIC Tuan Nguyen took a video of Project Snowblind on a new PC, which is playing video of a colored pattern across the transparent panel. It's not quite as vivid as the stark contrast of black & white, but it proves Project Snowblind works just fine with color imagery.

More exciting are the CPU readout and clock you can see on one side of the panel. Project Snowblind's panel is essentially serving as a second monitor, meaning it runs off an HDMI cable from your video card, and that allows it to display whatever you want in real-time. In this case, iBuypower had it set up with a Rainmeter plugin showing CPU usage and the time. If your computer tower is set up to be easily visible, you could have the side panel illuminated with tons of cool data: temperatures, storage usage, calendar notifications. Pretty rad.

Cost? $250 including the case.

The caveat is that this transparent panel needs some bright illumination behind it for contrast. Against your typical dark PC interior, you're not going to see much—Project Snowblind works much better with a white PC build and some LEDs providing a white surface to project in front of. If you're into that kind of PC build, though, this is the coolest case mod accessory we've seen in years.

iBuypower says Project Snowblind will be available in February for $250.